


Borrowing Grief

by CuteAsAMuntin



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Death, F/M, Fear of Death, Found Family, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, M/M, Mortality, No beta we die like stregobor should have, Polyamory, no beta we die like renfri
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 09:27:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30070167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CuteAsAMuntin/pseuds/CuteAsAMuntin
Summary: As a human, Jaskier the bard is so terribly short-lived. Geralt, a witcher, will live centuries more. But Yennefer? The sorceress will outlive generations of her family.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	Borrowing Grief

Yennefer is once again lying awake in the silence and the dark.

It has been many hours since her lovers have collapsed on the big bed in her second-best magicked tent, succumbing to the exhaustion of a long day’s travel. It seems fatherhood agrees with Geralt, has soothed much of his compulsive, anxious hypervigilance and Destiny-haunted insomnia. Jaskier, of course, has always had as companionable a relationship with sleep as with any other bedroom-adjacent activity, reaching easily for it in any strange bedroom or campsite without issue.

The mage often still finds herself awake late into the small hours of the night. Phantom aches sit deep in her bones, never quite removed by her transformation at Aretuza. Her mind treads well-worn routes: her duties to the family to her latest sorcerous experiments to the selfish worries she won’t voice in the light of day.

With a quiet huff, Yennefer eases herself into a sitting position. The motion is slow and smooth enough so as not to awaken the lightly-sleeping mutant pressed against her side. She winces at the fresh reminder of pain brought about by the new position. The expression is minute and silent, the sensation a familiar one after decades — or is it centuries, by now? — plying her trade across the Continent.

The discomfort is all but forgotten in a moment. Her bard mumbles and jerks in his sleep, and her witcher moves to pin him down with a strong arm and soothing rumble, all without ever waking. It eases that twisted, burning thing in her cold heart to see them so soft with one another, so unguarded in front of her.

Eases it, and yet simultaneously makes her ache all the more sharply with her love for them. When had she become so soft? Had it been the djinn that first cracked her open like this? Was it when Geralt had first brought Ciri to her, so small and fierce and full of Chaos and love in equal parts? Mayhap it had been the days watching her boys circle one another after the Dragon Mountains, only to realize the startling depths of her affections for the ridiculous bard when the witcher had confessed his amid a stilted apology to the both of them?

Or perhaps it had been even earlier when she had lain with Istredd, an ugly, crooked thing herself and yet one in which he saw such beauty and possibility. It might have been yet earlier still when Tissaia had taken her away from a hateful and neglecting family to an incomparable seat of power and Chaos, the only way the older sorceress knew how to show her love. It could have — and this is a truly horrifying thought, causing a shudder that she fights to suppress — always been there, tenderness and affection lurking inside her like a hex awaiting activation.

Perhaps, after all, it doesn’t truly matter whether the witch has always had this soft place inside or her little family has carved it out of her by inches. Perhaps all that matters is that now it is there, and it is a vulnerability. Yet, somehow, she would not exchange it for all the wine in Toussaint.

She gazes down with a warm expression at her lovers, intertwined as they are under the rumpled, sex-dampened sheets. In the dim starlight streaming through the tent-flaps, Geralt’s hair gleams as captured moonbeams, and the grey peppering Jaskier’s brown locks rivals the distant constellations.

Yennefer wonders again how long she’s been portaling across the Continent, or if her witcher has kept track of his age as the decades pass. She knows for certain that her bard is well past forty at this point. While he is spritely enough for his age, they have all avoided discussing what they are to do once he can no longer follow Geralt on the Path.

There is very little she can do herself to prolong the life of a human untouched by the gifts of Chaos or Elder blood. Not that she hasn’t done her fair share of research and experimentation on the subject. Geralt had come to her on his knees when he’d first noticed Jaskier’s gray hairs and wrinkles after a long stint apart, but she’d already been several years into her search. She was a calculating bitch and rather proud of it, but she wasn’t cruel to the undeserving. She had known even then how much they had loved one another, even if the pair was still too thick to do anything about it. Short of some magnanimous higher vampire deigning to turn the bard — whom Yennefer couldn’t imagine taking readily to true immortality — there was nothing to be done for it.

All that to say, Jaskier is going to die in a scant few decades, the blink of an eye for a witcher and even less for a sorceress. Geralt likely has another century or three left in him, provided he isn’t taken down by a pack of bruxae or a lucky leshen before then. Even then, the pair of them might still die any day of a perfectly normal contract gone awry. And then?

Then she’ll be alone. She knew from the moment her affair with the White Wolf became more than an adrenaline-fueled fuck, before she ever let his little lark flutter into her affections, that she’d be alone again in the end. She will be parted from her loves for gods only know how many endless years before succumbing to death’s welcome embrace herself. She knows that one day soon enough she will be left with a ragged, gaping hole in her long-lived heart. It does not matter the number of lovers she takes or the time she dedicates to raising Ciri — sweet Melitele, she cannot even contemplate how she will recover from the death of her child, long-lived though the Elder-blooded witcher-princess may be — and the future generations of their strange little family.

It is daunting and horrible to know that it fast approaches, the day she will be abandoned and so bereft. Yet, it has not made her love her men any less or feel the need to distance herself from them at all. How lucky she is — her, of all the Brotherhood’s ageless mages! — to have a love so true, and twice over at that. She clings to them twice as fiercely, knowing that one day, far too soon, all she will have of them is the memory of their affections.

It strikes her, suddenly, that they will never be altogether gone from the Path so long as she is alive to share the ballads of the White Wolf with the Continent’s traveling bards. She wonders if Jaskier ever intended any of this comfort for her, or if it is merely a happy accident. He might accuse her of character development, the academic little scamp.

Yennefer finds that she is glad, after all, that it will be her who survives the others. Not because she is afraid to die, though she is no less fearful of facing death than any other pitiful creature that clings to life, despite what the raised scars down her wrists might imply. No, it is because, of the three of them, she is certain that she is the one who will be able to survive. She will be the one to keep standing tall after losing her whole world and having her heart shattered twice over. She knows she can, if only because she will have to do it. First, it will be to keep strong for whichever one of them stays with her longer. Then, it will be to hold together whatever there is of their family as best she can once they’re both gone.

She can already feel the edges of the grief that will overtake the years or decades or, gods forbid, centuries she will have to keep on living without them. It suggests a shape so vast and abominable, an Eldritch terror of love and sadness and overwhelming loneliness. She does not know how she will avoid slipping beneath the surface, even as she is anchored by the two perfect bodies warming the bed beside her.

Her breath hitches, chest tight and quartz-sharp amethyst eyes swimming with the wetness that she dashes away with a fist. She’ll have none of that overwrought, emotional horseshit just now.

Her witcher and her bard are so blissfully alive, and she is blessed to be abed with them. Yennefer curls around Geralt’s broad, strong back, and she finds she is just able to grasp Jaskier’s hip with her right hand. She wriggles closer until their legs are all tangled with one another in the silk sheets.

She can hear the first birds of the dawn chorus. Morning is but a few hours off.

**Author's Note:**

> What’s up, today Yennefer of Vengerberg got the dubious honor of processing my anticipatory grief/secondhand mortality anxiety and abandonment issues for me.


End file.
